How do I make a list with links? - php

Question

Im making a list with names and links to full info about them. So, I've got simple search engine, which searching by the names or specific numbers. I use $_SESSION to get id of the people. The problem is, when there are more than 1 name and Im moving to the page of specific person appears the page of the last person in the list!
So, code of the search engine is:
if(isset($_POST['search'])){
$searchq = $_POST['search'];
$searchq = preg_replace("#[^0-9_a-z A-Z]#i","",$searchq);
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM contract WHERE name LIKE '%$searchq%' OR student_code LIKE '%$searchq%'") or die("could not search");
$count = mysql_num_rows($query);
if($count == 0){
$output = 'There was no such results!';
}
else{
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
$name = $row['name'];
$student_code = $row['student_code'];
$_SESSION['users_id'] = $row['users_id'];
$output = '<table border ="1"><tr><td>'.$name.' '.$student_code.'
</td>
<td>
<form action="cont.php" method="post">
<label>Look at the contract:</label>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value=">>">
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</table><br \>
And another script in the page file:
$users_id = $_SESSION['users_id'];
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM contract WHERE users_id = $users_id");
while($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$output1 =

Answer 1

The way I understood your question is that you have two pages. One page that does the search, and another page that show the "more info" about a specific result.
What you're basically doing in the search is this:
Let's assume you have three results that got Id 1,4,7.
This is what's going to happen in your while loop
Set $name $student_code and $_SESSION['user_id'] ($_SESSION['user_id'] is now 1)
Prepare the first result
Set $name $student_code and $_SESSION['user_id'] ($_SESSION['user_id'] is now 4)
Prepare the second result
Set $name $student_code and $_SESSION['user_id'] ($_SESSION['user_id'] is now 7)
Prepare the third result
As you can see you're always overwriting the session key and therefore only the last one will be available when you get to the "cont.php" page (where I'm guessing the other code is?)
One simple solution would be to bake the id into the form and send it along in the request to the cont.php page. Something like this:
<form action="cont.php" method="post">
<label>Look at the contract:</label>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value=">>">
<input type="hidden" name="user_id" value="' . $row['users_id'] . '">
</form>
And then in the cont.php you simply change this:
$users_id = $_SESSION['users_id'];
to this
$users_id = $_POST['users_id'];
Hope that helps :)